ATDTDA - grace

[Paul Mackin]

On Sat, 2007-02-10 at 17:10 -0500, kelber at mindspring.com wrote:
> But he uses "grace" to mean that things are what they are, which pains Lew, because it's the absence of hope.

Yeah, a bit  of a problem with that all-too-short second paragraph--with
no hint or anything of transition from the previous longer paragraph.
However, it doesn't seem to me possible to equate "things were exactly
what they were" with Lew's slightly earlier experience of "grace."  I
have to conclude that what "was more than Lew could bear" was the
disappearance of the grace that had moments ago been "surrounded by a
luminosity new to him"

It's a sudden shift from a fleeting happy, hopeful state back to a
dismal state of fairly  generalized misery. 

No one (except maybe Vibe) WANTS things the way they are.

But who's really to say . . . .


> 
> -----Original Message-----
> >From: Paul Mackin <paul.mackin at verizon.net>
> 
> 
> >So, Lew, very fleetingly, experiences a feeling that things are not, or
> >may not always be, what they are or what they seem.  But in the next
> >moment that feeling of hope (grace) has vanished.
> 
> >And at the end of the book, the Chum's fly toward the hope that somehow
> >"good unsought and uncompensated" will come into the world, although
> >there is as yet no sign of this actually happening.
> >
> >Against the Day is a book of Hope, Hope as yet unfulfilled.
> >
> >Anarchism is a hope of deliverance, but to date that deliverance has not
> >arrived or is any place in the vicinity. 
> >
> >Not on earth, only in magic and dreams.
> >
>